Summary This booklet gives an overview of the Search Conference, a change strategy which helps answer the question: “Can our strategy achieve our objectives?” by building shared understanding (a mental map) of how the organization or community really works.
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Description
The Strategic Forum is a process that allows an organization to uncover, clarify, and modify the mental models driving its most fundamental processes.
The structure of any social organization (business, nonprofit, or community), its mission, goals, and strategies--why and how it organizes itself--result from that organization’s individual and collective mental models. Mental models are the collection of assumptions, theories, anecdotes, and other mental facts and images used to make sense of complex systems and make decisions. Many of these mental models remain unspoken and untested--yet they drive the organization’s behavior.
Using a Systems Thinking approach, key stakeholders in a system use a Strategic Forum to develop a clear picture of how that system fits together--its mission, goals, and strategies--into an integrated whole. The Systems Thinking approach includes a language that facilitates surfacing and clarifying mental models. And the Systems Thinking approach can improve mental models because the language enforces a discipline of looking around at and understanding the interrelationships that are often overlooked in analyzing an organization or community. Relationships drive behavior, so understanding the relationships in the organization or community is the key to finding high-leverage solutions.
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Synopsis
The Collaborating for Change series offers concise, comprehensive overviews of 14 leading change strategies in a convenient, inexpensive format. Adapted from chapters in The Change Handbook, each approximately 48-page booklet is written by the originator of the change strategy or an expert practitioner, and includes
* An example of the strategy in action
* Tips for getting started
* An outline of roles, responsibilities, and relationships
* Conditions for success
* Keys to sustaining results
* Thought-provoking questions for discussion
you're deciding on a change strategy for your organization and you need a short, focused treatment of several alternatives to distribute to your colleagues... Or if you've decided on a change strategy and want to disseminate information about it to get everyone on board, the Collaborating for Change booklets are the ideal choice.
Other titles in the Collaborating for Change series:
* Appreciative Inquiry
* The Conference Model
* Future Search
* Gemba Kaizen
* Open Space Technology
* The Organization Workshop
* Participative Design Workshop
* Preferred Futuring
* Real Time Strategic Change
* The Search Conference
* The Strategic Forum
* The Think Like a Genius Process
* Whole-Scale Change
* Whole Systems Approach
